Contextual segmentation is a process of assigning a set of tags or labels to information objects. Information objects may include, for example, web objects, such as web pages and user profiles. Contextual tags may belong to a hierarchy, such as the Wikipedia hierarchy of categories or the Amazon product hierarchy.
Contextual segmentation may be used in a variety of ways to enhance user experiences on the Internet. Contextual segmentation is generally used in information retrieval to classify and categorize documents, as well as to enhance and refine search results. A variety of different information retrieval tasks are supported by contextual segmentation, such as general search tasks, routing, filtering, and classification of information objects, as well as higher-level processes, such as communication, language understanding, and translation.
In the context of Internet advertising, contextual segmentation may be utilized to classify and categorize web pages and user profiles to optimize targeted advertising. Web pages and user profiles may be divided into a number of categories, and advertisements may be delivered to users in a way that is optimized according to the content of a web page or the preferences of a user. Categories of web pages and user profiles may be referred to as page and user segments. Each page or user segment may have a different impact on advertising performance than other page or user segments, in accordance with their unique interests. Contextual segmentation of web pages and user profiles provides the ability to optimize advertising performance and business metrics, such as pay-per-click, revenue-per-impression, revenue-per-click, and revenue-per-action.
Existing methods of contextual segmentation suffer from a number of drawbacks. For example, many methods of contextual segmentation lack the scalability necessary to provide efficient segmentation for the ever-increasing number of web pages and users. Further, existing methods frequently use a fixed set of categories that is not updated quickly enough to respond to current events and interests.